The hills of Wiltshire are an area of outstanding natural beauty. It’s here that Andrew and Meryl run a 700 acre arable and dairy farm. While Andrew manages the farm, Meryl, an artist, runs a busy gallery in one of the converted barns.
However they don’t live on the farm, but in a village a couple of miles down the road. Now Andrew and Meryl want to build a new farmhouse in the middle of their land. The site for the new farmhouse is in the centre of all the action – right next door to Meryl’s gallery and a stone’s throw from the dairy and the farm workshops.
The proposed building will mimic the curved roofs of the local agricultural buildings, as well as the softly undulating landscape in which it sits. The backbone of the house will be formed by eight identical huge engineered-timber trusses. They’re as strong as a steel frame but they’ll add warmth, a powerful pleasing aesthetic and some ecological value.
The Plan
Agricultural functionality will meet style in the polished concrete floor that’ll run right through the open plan ground floor to Andrew’s office beyond.
Two pods containing utility rooms and a larder will sit in the open space while behind the kitchen, there’ll be a farm boot room and garage. To ensure privacy and retain heat, there’ll be just a few windows on the north side overlooking the gallery. But the entire south side will be triple-glazed, to trap solar energy and visually connect Andrew and Meryl to the land they own and work.
The first floor has been designed as a suspended gallery, set back to allow a full height space along the length of the building. The two floors will be connected by a sculptural helical staircase – a sort of corkscrew axis in the centre of the house.
Upstairs, the master bedroom will be glazed to again connect to the southerly view. A balcony will lead to three further bedrooms, that will also have glass walls. As with any proper barn, there’ll be a curving metal roof – made of zinc – that will overarch the building to provide summer shade and which should provide those hints of agricultural use.
Andrew and Meryl need to raise a substantial sum of money to pay for all this. So they plan to sell their old house – easier said than done when house prices are plummeting.
To construct the timber frame, layers and layers of top grade Douglas Fir have been glued and laminated together under pressure to form the enormous curves of Andrew and Meryl’s barrel roof. The frame will be visible throughout the house and so it needs to be exquisitely finished.
The glulam frame costs around £100,000. That isn’t cheap but it will give this new farmhouse a very distinctive wooden character. Architect Tim Bennett is on site to make sure the framers build it to his exacting standards.
Tim is so confident that he’s not going to change anything that astonishingly, he and Andrew ordered the windows five months ago. It’s a somewhat risky strategy because unless the timber frame is built to Tim’s exact measurements, the windows won’t fit. Fortunately for these self builders, all the measurements add up and the triple-glazed windows fit like a glove.
Inside, this building is really starting to develop its own hybrid personality. It has the cathedral-like height and woody repetition of a Tythe barn, but the jettied, suspended first floor gallery suggests a modern public building. And everywhere, the quality of the work is breathtaking. To top it off, the generous £600,000 budget is under control and the build is more or less on schedule.
Budget Information
- Original budget: £600,000
- Frame: £100,000
- Staircase: £40,000
- Final budget: £660,000
As well as the handmade bespoke kitchen, Meryl’s commissioning another of those items that Andrew will be using every day – the farm gates. These will be forged by local blacksmith and sculptor Melissa Cole, and designed to reflect the swaying crops of the farm in late summer. Meryl’s third and final big commission for the house is a dramatic sculptural staircase. It’ll be the thing that every visitor will notice on entering the building.
A Very British Summer
Unseasonal storms lash Wiltshire for days on end, and the builders are struggling. More seriously, the roofers have been delayed by 6 weeks waiting for a clear spell. All that is protecting the house is some plastic sheeting.
As June approaches, work at last begins on the metal roof that will make perhaps the biggest contribution to the agricultural feel of their building and help to root it in the farmed landscape that surrounds it. As you would expect on this project, quality is everything and the roofers are taking the extra time to join the zinc sheets by hand. The completed zinc roof has all the beauty of a well ploughed field.
Inside, a polished concrete floor is being laid throughout the whole living space. It’s the kind of touch that would look equally at home in an urban art gallery as a rural cow shed. And of course this house is a mixture of the two.
Manouvering the staircase in is a tricky task. This is £40,000 worth of exquisite fragile staircase that must fit precisely and land in place free of damage. Upstairs, the four bedrooms are taking shape along the gallery. Formed by the bays of the arched beams above, these are cosy spaces.
Finally, cedar cladding is added to the building’s exterior. The boarding pattern is one used throughout the world on vernacular buildings. A first layer of planks is laid with spaces between and the second layer then fixed to overlap them. The result is a corrugated effect that allows for movement in the timber. Once the internal fixtures and fittings are in place the house is ready to move into, and not a moment too soon because Andrew and Meryl have been living in temporary accommodation since selling their house in the local village.
